The story of this place
On 10 June 1942, in savage reprisal for the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, German forces surrounded the mining village of Lidice. All 173 men over fifteen were shot against a barn wall; the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and most of the 105 children were gassed at Chełmno, only a handful spared for 'Germanisation'. The village was burned, dynamited and bulldozed flat, its stream rerouted and its very name struck from the maps — yet the Nazis filmed the destruction as a warning. The atrocity so shocked the world that towns on several continents renamed themselves Lidice. Today a memorial, a mass grave, and a rose garden of thousands of bushes mark the empty valley.